[0.25]KSP Interstellar (Magnetic Nozzles, ISRU Revamp) Version 0.13

[Lightwarrior]

Personally i would like to have an option to buy all resources in VAB. They must be relatively (to parts that use this resources) expensive.

Contracts seem to be more fun than, for example, getting HE3 in KSPI so i will prefer to buy some, even if it is very expensive.

As for antimatter... you can attach KSPI lab to fission reactor, warp enough time on launchpad, and you will have a lot of antimatter. Almost for free considering that you will recover those craft. Than you have to transfer those antimatter, and there is no stock/convinient way to do it. This is not fun and way worse than doing few part tests in crazy conditions and bying some antimatter.

[WaveFunctionP]

Personally i would like to have an option to buy all resources in VAB. They must be relatively (to parts that use this resources) expensive.

Contracts seem to be more fun than, for example, getting HE3 in KSPI so i will prefer to buy some, even if it is very expensive.

As for antimatter... you can attach KSPI lab to fission reactor, warp enough time on launchpad, and you will have a lot of antimatter. Almost for free considering that you will recover those craft. Than you have to transfer those antimatter, and there is no stock/convinient way to do it. This is not fun and way worse than doing few part tests in crazy conditions and bying some antimatter.

You can already use mods to add resources to your craft. Time warping on the launch pad can be rectified by removing the ability to create antimatter. If you wish to "cheat", then by all means, just install a mod to do it for you. With enough infrastructure requirements and limitations, time warping could cause problems in your supply chain, which would provide a disincentive to warping with impunity.

Edited July 21, 2014 by WaveFunctionP

[Rocket_Architect_Blasen]

32 bit ksp can only address ~4GB, less really, which is why texture reduction pack or plugins are required. You'll need to install a mod like active texture reduction if you want to use 32bit with high memory mods like kspi.

I'm using 64-bit. That's why I'm so puzzled. I've also had larger groups of mods running than this back when I was using 32 bit. I have this, Kerbal attatchment, crew manifest, and a few other minor ones installed.

[Modemus]

Yeah yeah, I know.. wrong forum... but I love you guys!

So.. when is 0.24 going to drop?

~Steve

yes when is 0.24 coming? the current version doesn't have any key binding options. when i click on any item in the group/hotkey panel while building, like the warp drive or radiators, the action buttons like "toggle panels" and "activate warp drive" are gone. nonexistent. empty. i built myself an amazing warp ship, only to find out that the required buttons to use it were no longer there. its like i clicked on a fuel tank. there's just the part name, nothing else

[NeoAcario]

yes when is 0.24 coming? the current version doesn't have any key binding options. when i click on any item in the group/hotkey panel while building, like the warp drive or radiators, the action buttons like "toggle panels" and "activate warp drive" are gone. nonexistent. empty. i built myself an amazing warp ship, only to find out that the required buttons to use it were no longer there. its like i clicked on a fuel tank. there's just the part name, nothing else

Zombie quote...

~Steve

[Crim1]

Zombie quote...

~Steve

soooo not good enough for answer? I'm trying to figure out whether anything needs to be tested or if KSP is even playable with KSPI on x64, kinda hard to spot bugs and help get fixes for problems when we cant even get an answer on the playability of the experimental build.

[Lightwarrior]

You can already use mods to add resources to your craft. Time warping on the launch pad can be rectified by removing the ability to create antimatter. If you wish to "cheat", then by all means, just install a mod to do it for you. With enough infrastructure requirements and limitations, time warping could cause problems in your supply chain, which would provide a disincentive to warping with impunity.

Yes, i can use tac fuel balancer, and will probably use it as i did in 0.23. But it is cheating, and cheating in sandbox game is something that i dont like at all. I just hoped that in .24 it will be possible to make resources available for purchase in VAB, so i can buy them, not just "add".

Main reason for this is the fact, that all resources can be obtained by timewarping on launchpad, without any "supply chain", and this is not fun. And if/when you try to build something like a base producing resources or self-sufficient power station it causes a lot of frustration because almost everything is broken on unfocused crafts. Fuel consumption, ISRU functions, etc. I understand that main reason for this is how game itself works, but it makes game "not fun" anyway...

Also, for someone who want to build those "AM farms" etc it will make things even better. It will be possible to recover vessel with AM, get funds, and than just buy this antimatter from VAB when needed. Actually it seems like very simple way to add much needed resource recovery option.

[merendel]

While yes you can use TAC FB to cheat you can also use it to simulate storage of valuable resorces with out the excessive work of haveing to dock a fueling craft with every new launch or recovered craft. For AM in particular I setup an AM containment tanker at KSP. When I'm about to recover a craft that has a supply of AM I note how much and use TAC to add that to the tanker. Similarly when I want to launch a craft with some AM I add the desired amount to the ship and subtract it from the tanker. slightly cheaty but its mostly just saveing me alot of bussy work that should be handled by the ground crew anyway. I could recover it all by hand without TAC but like I said, its busy work I can do without.

I'd rather have an automated storage system than a way to buy AM. The stuff is rather OP and should be very expensive. The problem is if you make it as expensive as it should be you can just recover a small farmed amount and have the funds for thousands of huge conventional ship launches. If you give it a cheeper value to avoid that now its too easy to just run a few contracts to buy the stuff and just skip collection. I just dont see a good way to balance the price to avoid weird situations like that.

[ArcFurnace]

They were beyond green. My maximum dissipation was 5x the total heat production of the radiator. I know the radiators are more effective in atmosphere but it seems really strange to me that they're less than 1/5th as efficient in vacuum.

When in vacuum, the amount of heat dissipated by the radiators depends very strongly upon the radiator temperature (proportional to the fourth power of the temperature). The temperature is determined by how much of your WasteHeat capacity is filled. The net effect of this is that in space, if you generate waste heat at a constant rate, the level of stored waste heat on your ship will increase until it reaches equilibrium (the rate at which waste heat is removed by radiators is equal to the rate at which waste heat is produced). Note that no matter how many radiators you add to your ship, if you are generating power in space, you will ALWAYS have nonzero stored waste heat, because your radiators need to heat up in order to function. Adding more radiators will let you push the equilibrium temperature/amount of stored waste heat lower, but it's very hard to push it below a certain level due to how strong the temperature dependence is (to halve the equilibrium temperature, you need 16 times the radiator area).

When in an atmosphere, radiators will also dump heat by convection. This is modeled as a fairly large level of waste heat removal that does NOT depend upon the radiator temperature. Technically that's not how it should work in the real world, but it's how it's coded at the moment. This is why you can have 0 stored waste heat while generating power in atmosphere- heat is being removed by convection faster than it is produced by the reactor, so your radiators don't heat up at all.

On top of that, if you're using an unupgraded Akula reactor (particle bed reactor), that has an optimum operating temperature- if it heats up above that optimum temperature, its power output drops. Also, generator efficiency is determined by the difference between the reactor temperature and the radiator temperature. Upgraded radiators plus unupgraded fission reactors can cause problems because the maximum radiator temperature is actually above the reactor temperature- if you have very few radiators and they heat up to the reactor temperature, the generator efficiency will drop to 0%. Your reactor won't melt, but you won't get much electricity, either. The VAB thermal helper should let you check that, though- look at the equilibrium temperature/generator efficiency figures for 100% power.

[WaveFunctionP]

Yes, i can use tac fuel balancer, and will probably use it as i did in 0.23. But it is cheating, and cheating in sandbox game is something that i dont like at all. I just hoped that in .24 it will be possible to make resources available for purchase in VAB, so i can buy them, not just "add".

Main reason for this is the fact, that all resources can be obtained by timewarping on launchpad, without any "supply chain", and this is not fun. And if/when you try to build something like a base producing resources or self-sufficient power station it causes a lot of frustration because almost everything is broken on unfocused crafts. Fuel consumption, ISRU functions, etc. I understand that main reason for this is how game itself works, but it makes game "not fun" anyway...

Also, for someone who want to build those "AM farms" etc it will make things even better. It will be possible to recover vessel with AM, get funds, and than just buy this antimatter from VAB when needed. Actually it seems like very simple way to add much needed resource recovery option.

The point I was making is that your reasoning that since time warping is available, all resources should be available from the VAB is flawed. It assumes that the intended behavior of the player is to "cheat" to obtain those resources freely (since time has no effective cost in game). I was saying that the only reason why such methods are viable is because the resource system isn't design to disincentivize such behavior and that the systems could be modified to provide more depth. I think that you are missing another critical point in that if the cost of resources is high, player psychology tends to turn to a grinding strategy (doing boring stuff over and over because it is more optimal) vs playing the game the way it was intended. Meaning that you could make antimatter cost really high and it would just incentivize many players into grinding contracts for currency. This behavior is not exactly unknown, it is pretty predictable. From camping in EQ, to mining in EvE, to farming in D3, if there is a more efficient way to do something in a game, it will be done that way by the majority, even if the thing itself is unfun so much so that it makes them hate the game.

I rather a system that rewards high tier technologies by setting up infrastructure to support those technologies. IE, sending a am collector to Jool, vs sitting on the tarmac time warping with impunity. I'd rather you have to collect said resource by performing a mission and then recover the resources that have been collected before they can be made available in the VAB.

Additionally, there is no "buying" in a sandbox game, so I must admit your post is very confusing. The examples in your previous posts are the exact type of unfun behavior I'm talking about.

afaik, the only resources that can't be collect in the background is He-3. And honestly, I don't see the point of all the extra modes in the first place but that is another topic for another day.

Moving on to a more general concern I have...

The experimental version is in no way official. When fractal comes back, he is not likely to incorporate any of my code into the base kspi. And in fact, each time he updates the code I have to go back and reapply all the changes manually because his repo isn't functional or complete. Which means that I am very wary of making any code changes since it basically means double the work for me. Unless I get word that fractal isn't coming back, few changes will likely happen that aren't bug fixes or part.cfg edits. Fractal is a much better programmer than I am, so I don't expect things to be different should he come back. And he has already mentioned some fairly big code changes in development. Since he doesn't share the code while he works on it, I have no option to wait just like the rest of you or risk wasting a bunch of time and effort on work that will be made obsolete in the next version.

I am happy that some of you have chosen to use my version, and I'll continue updating it as long as I am playing KSP regularly. But I am in an ackward position. Fractal doesn't speak to me. I'm just some other forum dude like the rest of you when it comes to kspi development.

And lets be fair here. It's been like a week since .24 came out. People take vacations longer than that.

Edited July 21, 2014 by WaveFunctionP

[sidfu]

soooo not good enough for answer? I'm trying to figure out whether anything needs to be tested or if KSP is even playable with KSPI on x64, kinda hard to spot bugs and help get fixes for problems when we cant even get an answer on the playability of the experimental build.

if on 64x use the expermental build because the normal kspi .11 for .23.5 causes iva and rpm issues. so the expermental works fien with .24 64x eveb thou prices are not balaanced

@wavefunctionp dont worry dont think fractal talks to anyone lol

[Alewx]

The experimental version is in no way official. When fractal comes back, he is not likely to incorporate any of my code into the base kspi.

Do you have any idea when that might be?

[Donziboy2]

Do you have any idea when that might be?

It does not appear that anyone has had contact with Fractal_UK outside of the forums.

[Alewx]

It does not appear that anyone has had contact with Fractal_UK outside of the forums.

Wow, you mean kspi is a total one man show? Impressive and scaring.

[kmrc555]

The experimental version doesn't work for me. When i try to select the interstellar tree the game crashes. Im using the 64bit version.

[JeffersonFlight]

if on 64x use the expermental build because the normal kspi .11 for .23.5 causes iva and rpm issues. so the expermental works fien with .24 64x eveb thou prices are not balaanced

@wavefunctionp dont worry dont think fractal talks to anyone lol

The expermental build hasn't fixed the RPM issue for me on 64 bit. If I use it I still get the RPM white screen and no IVA animations work.

[Reign Of Magic]

Can't wait to get an update for this. I just have 1 suggestion although. Could you add a tweakable option for all the reactors/radiators to allow the switching between upgraded & initial? Reason I am asking is because there are quite a few instances where I use the .65 safe fission reactor or 2 of the 1.25 KIWI reactors for power generation (Depending on needs of either EC or MW) due to their longer lifespans than the bigger reactors. I find it rather frustrating that as soon as the bits get upgraded that lifespan gets cut down to around around 1/5th of the duration. I really like the upgrades don't get me wrong especially on the bigger reactors, but there are a lot of instances where I want duration, not throughput, and currently there is no option to switch that.

In any case, thanks for the great mod!

[NeoAcario]

So what's the deal with FracktalUK? Some people say he's on Vacation... Is he really on a vacation.. or just taking a break from KSP? Did I miss a post of his somewhere?

~Steve

[ecat]

The experimental version doesn't work for me. When i try to select the interstellar tree the game crashes. Im using the 64bit version.

This is the same place my game was crashing when I tried IS. This happened with 0.24 x64 and the previous x64 hack, no matter what I tried, even a clean install with IS as the only mod I could not get IS to run under x64.

Yesterday I was ready to give up on x64, in preparation for the return to x86 I installed Active Texture Management. With nothing to lose I had one last try running IS and it worked

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/87157-How-is-64-bit-working-for-you?p=1288848&viewfull=1#post1288848

So, make a clean 0.24 x64 install, add ATM 3.1, use the fix from biohazard15 that you see in the above link, add WaveFunctionP's IS and see what happens

Edited July 21, 2014 by ecat

[prullenbak]

Fractal has been gone for far longer than just a week IIRC. KSPI 0.11 is several months old. It's a true shame if he doesn't work on the mod anymore because it's by far one of the best mods for this game.

I would love to see more of it.

Edited July 21, 2014 by prullenbak

[AndreyATGB]

Fractal has been gone for far longer than just a week IIRC. KSPI 0.11 is several months old. It's a true shame if he doesn't work on the mod anymore because it's by far one of the best mods for this game.

I don't think he abandoned it, if he did I think we would've seen the latest source released at the very least. Last post he made AFAIK was maybe a month ago, on page 997 or so when I asked him to do something for page 1k.

[Kiithnaras]

I have experienced a disappointment, and I am curious as to a work-around; Squad has finally added a science module to the accelerometer - However, I REALLY liked the method that KSPI used to gather science with them. Is there any way to override the vanilla functionality and replace it with IS functionality? Using the x64 version of KSP here, and also curious if that has anything to do with them not functioning appropriately.

Nevermind. I have found the herp-derp - Two different versions of ModuleManager in the GameData folder. Go me. Removed, everything works grand now with KSPI (AFAIK)

Edited July 21, 2014 by Kiithnaras
Herp Derp

[Alewx]

I don't think he abandoned it, if he did I think we would've seen the latest source released at the very least. Last post he made AFAIK was maybe a month ago, on page 997 or so when I asked him to do something for page 1k.

Hopefuly he is just in summer vacation.

[Lightwarrior]

WaveFunctionP,

Ok, probably the problem is that i just do not want to bother with resource collection in this game, or because i had some problems making things work off-focus (like UF4/ThF4 reprocessing, comsumption, mining etc...), actually it does not matter, i was just trying to express my opinion. If i understand things correctly, resource availability in VAB and prices can be changed with mm config, and probably i will try to make one myself...

[WaveFunctionP]

Finished a first pass on cost adjustments. Expect wildly inflated costs and relative weirdness. Feedback on SPECIFIC part costs is appreciated. Yes, cost is intended to somewhat prohibit what you are able to do. career != sandbox.

Resource costs( and recovery, hopefully), along with ongoing part cost adjustments are coming next.